Monthly Archives: May 2025

May 31, 2025

Today is hot as balls in Fecal Creek. Day two of triple digits, dear reader, and its technically not even June! All the prognostications, scientific and otherwise, indicate that this is going to be a violently and punitively hot summer. As I may have mentioned before, I’m actually going to try to lean into the heat this year. Sort of an “if you can’t beat it, join it” resignation, I suppose. To that end, I may road trip to Death Valley this summer. If I’m feeling really ballsy, I might even book a stay at the notorious Tarantula Ranch. After a couple of days dealing with scorpions and vipers in 120F+ heat, coming back to The Creek will feel downright autumnal. Such drastic measures may be ill advised though…even a couple of days in those sorts of conditions can permanently scramble a person’s mind, even if it doesn’t kill him. Rumor has it that Charles Manson was a pretty reserved, well-adjusted dude before he decided to take up residence in Death Valley. I dunno. We’ll see.

There’s no getting around the fact that aside from personal misery and discomfort and swamp ass, this heat makes life around here difficult. I’m pretty much stuck in the Safe House for the time being…the asphalt on the street outside is so hot that it causes tires to melt completely in a couple of blocks. Regrettably, I didn’t stock up on booze before the heat wave hit, so I’m shit out of luck in the tequila and whiskey department. The heat seems to block satellite signals, so there’s no reliable internet connection. The garage door quit working, though that might be due to demonic possession rather than extreme heat…who knows. No one’s talking. Even my Mexican puppy, who was whelped in the brutal Tijuana heat, finds the present conditions untenable. She’s on strike, refusing to even be cute until the situation improves.

But never mind all that…today is massive on the Dead Poets Society calendar. On this wild, untamed day—May 31, 1819—a raw force of nature roared into being in West Hills, New York. Walt Whitman, the untethered soul who’d soon carve his name into the beating heart of poetry, came kicking and screaming into the world. This isn’t our usual birthday nod, dear reader…it’s a full-throated howl for the man who’d become the father of free verse, a literary outlaw who tore through the stuffy rules of his time with the reckless abandon of a storm. His work, sprawling and sweaty like Leaves of Grass, doesn’t play nice with polite society—it’s transcendental, sure, but it’s also got the grit of realism, the kind of voice that makes you feel the dirt caked under your nails and the thrum of your own pulse.

Whitman’s words aren’t here to coddle you. They’re a call to the wild, a dare to embrace the messy, beautiful chaos of the human spirit and the body electric. His poems still get hauled into classrooms, thank Christ, not because they’re tame or safe, but because they’ve got the kind of fire that makes you feel alive, line after line. It’s the sort of fearless, in-your-face brilliance that keeps poetry kicking through the ages.

To demonstrate Whitman’s current cultural significance, remember, dear reader, that it was Walt Whitman who ultimately brought down Walter White. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Walt, Breaking Bad would likely be into its 10th amazing season by now.

So here’s to Whitman, the rugged bard who showed us how to sing our own song, unapologetically, with every ounce of our being. Let’s raise a glass (unfortunately the strongest thing on hand is lemonade) to the man who’s been shaking things up for over two centuries—may his spirit keep us restless, always.

N.P.: “The Heat” – The Bones of J.R. Jones

Word of the Day: phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria (noun): An extravagant or rapidly shifting series of images, scenes, or events. Often surreal, like the fever dream offspring of Salvador Dali and a fog machine that accidently got doused in absinthe.

This six-syllable beast is French by the way of Italian (phantasma, meaning apparition) and Greek (phantazein, “to make visible”). It originally described spooky lantern shows in the last 1700s, where ghastly apparitions cavorted on the walls to the audiences who clearly hadn’t discovered Netflix yet. Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and now the word applies to anything dazzling, surreal, or chaotic enough to make you question what you just saw.

Last Tuesday, I found myself on a regrettably misjudged blind date at a “conceptual sushi” bar. The walls were painted in migraine-inducing hues of magenta. Tiny drones floated around distributing soy sauce, landing in your palm like mutant fireflies. Somewhere about us, a DJ dressed as a sixteenth-century plague doctor spun trance tracks that sounded like a Roomba choking on a harmonica. My date, a professional “life coach,” was Instagramming her un-photoshoppable sashimi while babbling at me that mercury was in retrograde.
Somewhere amid all this aesthetic carnage, the dried seaweed I was chewing achieved an unfortunate synergy with the sake I’d been guzzling wholesale to cope. And then, like clockwork, the bathroom hit me with an urgency that felt almost biblical in its scope. On the way there, I tripped over an LED art installation of “origami tigers,” clawed at a neon bonsai tree, and landed in front of a video montage projected onto the bathroom door.
It was a phantasmagoria of winding anime pandas, old Godzilla clips, and stock footage of oil spills. “Experience Transcendence Through Crisis,” the caption advised. I stared at it, utterly destroyed by existential malaise and the sushi equivalent of a bad acid trip.
Needless to say, there won’t be a second date.

N.P.: “Living For The City feat. Tash Neal” – Slash

May 29, 2025

Strap in, you uncultured heathens, because today we’re going to the fucking ballet. Because we’ve got class, don’t we, dear reader? Damn right.

Rewind to May 29, 1913, when Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées became ground zero for a creative detonation that’d leave the arts bleeding and begging for more. Igor Stravinsky, a mad Russian genius with a penchant for sonic mayhem, unleashed The Rite of Spring—a ballet so raw, so primal, it made the powdered-wig crowd lose their goddamn minds. No tutu-and-slippers affair, this; this is a feral, earth-shaking ritual that’d ripple into the literary sphere like a tidal wave crashing through a library.

The setup alone is a fever dream: Stravinsky’s score is nuts (at least it was considered so then), all jagged rhythms and dissonant howls, conjures a pagan rite where a young girl dances herself to death to appease the gods of spring. The premiere was a straight-up scandal. The audience rioted—fists flying, boos drowning out the orchestra—because this wasn’t art as they knew it; this was a declaration of war on tradition. Stravinsky later said he’d never seen such a “terrifying” reaction, and Nijinsky (the choreographer) had to shout counts from the wings just to keep the dancers on beat amid the chaos.

Why does this matter to a literary fiend? Because in addition to pretty much breaking music and dance, The Rite of Spring cracked open the cultural psyche, inspiring writers to chase that same raw, untamed energy. Modernist scribes like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, already stirring the pot with their own rule-breaking verse, found a kindred spirit in Stravinsky’s rebellion. You can draw a straight line from the ballet’s savage pulse to the apocalyptic undertones of Eliot’s The Waste Land, published just nine years later in 1922.

This event, a glorious middle finger to the establishment, redefined what art could be. It dared to be ugly, to be real, to rip the veil off human nature and show the blood beneath. On May 29, 1913, Stravinsky lit a fuse that’d burn through the century, and we’re still feeling the heat. In that same spirit, let’s write something today that’d make the old guard clutch their pearls all over again.

N.P.: “Hau Ruck 2025” – KMFDM

May 28, 2025

Today, dear reader, we wind the dial back to 1937, a year when the world was still clawing its way out of the Great Depression’s chokehold. On May 28, John Steinbeck—that raw, unflinching scribe of the human struggle—dropped a literary bombshell with Of Mice and Men, first published as a novella in The American Mercury magazine before it landed on bookshelves later that year. The book was a deep dive into the shattered dreams of two drifters, George and Lennie, chasing the American Dream in a world that’s nothing but dust and broken promises.

Steinbeck was not one to mess around. His lean, razor-sharp prose slices through the page like my switchblade, laying bare the brutal loneliness and fragile hope of an era where survival was a daily gamble. You can feel the weight of the time in every line—the desperation, the fleeting glimmers of something better, always just out of reach. It’s storytelling that doesn’t hold your hand or whisper sweet nothings; it grabs you by the collar and forces you to stare into the abyss of a society on its knees. And even now, nearly a century later, its legacy burns through American literature, a haunting reminder of what happens when you dare to look away from the underbelly of the human condition.

N.P.: “Are They Real or Not – Special Version” – Boys Don’t Cry

Review: The Human Centipede Trilogy

The Human Centipede Trilogy

Reviewed by Jayson Gallaway on 27 May 2025 .

2.5 out of 5

I Lost a Bet and Got Sewn to The Human Centipede Trilogy: A Marathon Review of Glorious, Gnarly Horror

What it is, dear reader. Today’s post will be less Shakespeare and more shitshow. I lost a bet—don’t ask, it involved tequila and a first edition of Naked Lunch—and my punishment? Watching and reviewing all three Human Centipede movies in one butt-clenching sitting. Yeah, all three. I thought I was tough, having survived the first film back in the day, which left me rattled despite my usual “meh” to horror. But this? This was a descent into a septic tank of cinematic insanity. Grab a barf bag, because I’m diving into this trilogy like a doomed centipede segment, and I’m dragging you with me, mainly so you don’t have to do it alone.

By now, you know me, dear reader, as the guy that laughs at Saw traps and shrugs at Hostel, but I got blindsided by The Human Centipede (First Sequence) years ago. Tom Six’s 2009 freakshow—where a mad doctor stitches three people ass-to-mouth to form a grotesque “centipede”—wasn’t just gross; it was pretty deeply unsettling. The clinical vibe, the silence, the way Dieter Laser’s Dr. Heiter stared like he was auditioning for Satan’s optometrist? It stuck with me, and not in a fun “let’s rewatch” way. So when my buddy bet me I couldn’t handle a trilogy marathon, I scoffed. I’m the dude who read American Psycho while eating tacos. How bad could it be? Spoiler: I’m now spiritually unemployed.

The Marathon: 5 Hours, 3 Films, 1 Existential Crisis
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)
Runtime: 92 minutes. Feels like: A lifetime in a German dungeon.
Well, here we go. Rewatching First Sequence was like revisiting a nightmare you swore you’d burned. Two American tourists (Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie) and a Japanese dude (Akihiro Kitamura) get lured to Dr. Heiter’s sleek, unsettlingly sterile house. Next thing you know, they’re drugged, strapped, and sewn into a human caterpillar for “science.” The concept alone is enough to gag a maggot, but it’s the execution that’s diabolical. Six doesn’t linger on gore; he makes you feel the violation through long, quiet shots of Heiter’s glee and the victims’ muffled sobs. Laser’s performance is unhinged—his bug-eyed intensity and broken English (“I vill feed you!”) make Hannibal Lecter look like a vegan life coach. In this sea of unsettling images, perhaps the most disturbing is the fact that Dr. Heiter wears Crocs™ whilst performing surgery.
The infamous “feeding scene”? I gagged harder than I did at my aunt’s vegan meatloaf. It’s not the visuals (though, ew); it’s the psychological weight. These people are completely aware, trapped in a living hell. The first time I saw it, I was disturbed by how it crawled under my skin. This time, knowing what’s coming, I’m just mad at myself for not betting double-or-nothing. Literary merit? Hell yeah—think Kafka’s Metamorphosis but with worse plumbing. It’s a twisted allegory for control, dehumanization, and, I suppose, German efficiency.
I’m hesitant to review or even rate this film, as Roger Ebert’s review and rating was about as perfect as such a thing could be. And I quote: “I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.” This review was published on May 4, 2010, in the Chicago Sun-Times. He was basically saying that the film’s extreme and depraved content defies conventional evaluation, and he was quite right. I’m not about to defy that rationale. But there are a couple of things I want to touch on since we’re here.
First, Deiter Laser makes this film what it is. Dieter plays the role of Dr. Josef Heiter, a deranged German surgeon who is cold, calculating, and sadistic. Laser’s performance made Dr. Heiter one of the most memorable villains in horror film history. No small feat.
Second, what disturbed me when I first watched this movie and what disturbs me still most about it are 1) the mind that could think this up. Who’s the person who could have made whatever kind of movie with whatever kind of message he wanted, and he chose to do this. I’m not sure that I’d want to go drinking with Tom Six, based only on this movie. And 2) what must it have been like on the set? These are young actors, probably easily the biggest gig in their nascent careers, of course they took the role, even after having read the script. But imagine having to show up on set for weeks, putting your north pucker on someone’s south pucker. These poor kids…and their poor families…they’ve been supporting these kids acting dreams for years, and hot damn they already got their first role in a horror feature. Was there a premiere for this thing? Can you imagine going to the premier with your daughter to see her in her what will you’re certain will be the first of many starring roles in a major motion picture. And there she is, your little princess, on a screen bigger than God, being surgically forced to eat shit. What did these families say to Tom Six at the after-party? Did they shake his hand? Was Tom Six assaulted by multiple sets of parents? Nothing would surprise me.
Also, the spiral staircase in the escape scene was brilliant.
I will say that knowing what I was getting into beforehand made the experience significantly less traumatic than my initial viewing. The same cannot, however, be said about the next two films that I’m about to sit through. Might as well get on with it. Press Play.

The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011)
Runtime: 91 minutes. Feels like: Being buried alive in a porta-potty.
The pre-credit info blurb just let me know that this film was banned in England, a fact about which writer/director Tom Six is extremely proud. Good for him. I’d be proud, too. Maybe this Tom Six guy is cooler than I thought.
Damn…this one opens right where the last one left off, which I would have really rather left it alone, in the past. I had hoped we had moved on. But here we are.
Oh, this is meta as hell…the movie doesn’t take up the plot where we left it in the last movie…we are watching the end credits roll with some bug-eyed fat man. It quickly becomes obvious that Part II is about a guy who watched Part I and gets inspired to one-upmanship. This is meta as hell. And it gets even more self-referential: the actress Ashlynn Yennie, who plays Jenny, the only surviving part of the Human Centipede in the first film, shows up in this film playing herself. This could be the most meta thing I’ve seen since grad school.
Apparently, after the release of the first film, Tom Six heard “that was messed up” and went, “Hold my scalpel.” Full Sequence cranks the dial to 11, swapping the first film’s restraint for a black-and-white bloodbath. This time, we follow Martin (Laurence R. Harvey), a sweaty, asthmatic creep obsessed with the first movie. He’s not a doctor—just a parking lot attendant who decides to DIY a 12-person centipede in a grimy warehouse. Yeah, 12. With hammers, duct tape, and zero medical skills.
If First Sequence was a scalpel, this is a sledgehammer. The gore is splatterpunk and cartoonish—think stapled flesh and teeth-knocked-out DIY surgery—but the vibe is suffocating. Martin’s silent, bug-like obsession (Harvey doesn’t speak, just wheezes) makes Heiter look cuddly. The meta angle—Martin’s inspired by the “fictional” Human Centipede—is clever but drowned in filth. There’s a scene with a newborn baby that made me yeet my popcorn and question my life choices.
Literary parallel? This is American Psycho meets 120 Days of Sodom, a study in obsession and depravity. But where the first film had a twisted elegance, this is just… mean. The scatology is no longer basically implied like the first movie…this time it’s right there, in repugnant black and white. I’m not disturbed; I’m exhausted. My badass cred is crumbling like Martin’s duct-tape stitches.
Rating: 5/10 rusty staples. Points for audacity, but I need a shower and a priest.

The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence) (2015)
Runtime: 102 minutes. Feels like: A prison riot in my soul.
It’s about midnight, I’m a husk of a man, but Final Sequence is here to finish me. Here are the essentials: Set in a desert prison, this flick follows Bill Boss (Dieter Laser, back and yelling), a psychotic warden, and his accountant Dwight (Laurence R. Harvey, also back) who decide to solve prison riots by—you guessed it—making a 500-person centipede. Tom Six is clearly trolling, and I’m his victim.
And Holy monkey, the metaness keeps doubling down on itself. Part III starts with the ending of II, and then the end credits roll (basically the same beginning as II, but updated). And we see someone else is watching II and Getting Ideas. But who is watching? Why, it’s our old friend from I, Deiter Laser, the insane psycho surgeon from I. But he got quite killed in the end of I…bullet through the head. So now Dieter is back…as someone else? Holy shit. But wait…Dieter is being shown the film by…why, it’s our old friend we just left in H.C.II, Laurence R Harvey, the dude who played Martin. But he too got quite killed in the end of II…bullet through the head. So now Laurence too is back…as someone else? Holy shit, indeed. I sense a bit of a pattern, here, dear reader. This is either laziness or brilliance. We shall see.
Okay…so Dieter is ostensibly back as an entirely new character, as a prison warden named Bill Boss. But he’s the same guy! At first I thought these roles might have been given to these two actors to showcase the breadth of their respective abilities. Nope! Dieter is the exact same guy from I, just without the lab coat. His voice and distinct German accent are exactly the same. His strange and disturbing mannerisms and psychotic reactions are exactly the same. His antisocial contempt for everyone around him and indeed all human beings is the same. Exactly no attempt has been made by him or anyone else to change a thing about Dieter’s character other than his clothes. Is he the surgeon reincarnated? And if he just watched the first two movies, wouldn’t he be shocked by his total, identical resemblance to the Dr. Heiter in I? Or is Dr. Heiter just the latest incarnation of some sort of evil juggernaut who keeps coming back, no matter how you killed him in the previous movie, a la Jason Vorhees or Michael Meyers? Wouldn’t he recognize his assistant/prison accountant as Martin when he watched II? Also, there is simply no getting around the fact that dressed in a cowboy hat, bolo tie, bald head, and light colored sunglasses, Dieter looks disturbingly like James Carville.
Another brilliant meta moment: Dieter says, “Over my dead body,” a clear reference to the death of his character in I.
He snacks on a jar of clitori from Africa, and he has the prison kitchen prepare an inmate’s balls for his lunch. He then rather orgiastically wipes the blood from that castration all over his face
Then he gets a hummer from porn star Bree Olson, to completion, as we watch his already disturbing face contort. The scene subsequently devolves.
None of the correctional officers in the prison where Deiter is the warden seem to notice/care that the warden is clearly, egregiously, totally insane.
It turns out the reason Dwight the accountant (who was Martin in II) was showing the I and II movies to Deiter was to offer a solution to control the riotous prisoners.
Then the metaness just explodes as Dieter refers to the first two movies as “That B-movie shit.” When he learns that they will be bringing the writer and director of the movie, Tom Six, himself, into the movie to advise them on how to make a human centipede, Dieter says of Mr. Six: The man is still in his potty stage. A poop-infatuated toddler…a stupid filmmaker [with] a poooooop fetish.”
Once the decision is made to make the prisoners into a giant, 500-person human centipede to control them and to keep themselves from getting fired by the governor, Dwight, the prison accountant, drops a great quote: “We don’t gotta deal with their shit anymore, they just gotta deal with each other’s.”
The most meta moment is when Tom Six himself shows up, and his charaacters direide Mr. Six as a “man…still in his potty stage. A poop-infatuated toddler…a stupid filmmaker [with] a poooooop fetish.”
They reference the cultural impact of The Human Centipede movies, mentioning the South Park episode The Human Cent-iPad.
Running with the self-referential meta-dom, Deiter: “Wake up! We are not in a movie, playing some idiots!” Oh, but you are. Aren’t you?
Things hit peak meta-weirdness when Tom Six tells his characters that they may use this human centipede idea, but he’s sick of the “rubber and latex” bullshit from his movie sets, so he wants to see a real operation in person. Even though it’s obviously going to be more rubber and latex bullshit from his movie set…or is it?
The prisoners are to be shown the first two films back-to-back on movie night.
“This trash occupies a world in which the stars don’t shine” Which, of course, is a meta-as-fuck call-back to Roger Ebert’s legendary review of the first film. While watching the films, one inmate calls for it to be banned. Priceless. I have new respect for Tom Six.
During the procedure, Bill Boss offers to show Tom Six “some human centipede improvement.” Which is “copyrighted by Bill Boss.” So the characters are now giving the writer director advice on the movie, while maintaining the copyright?
Then Tom Six throws up in disgust.
Then the governor changes his mind about firing the warden, turns the town car around, and goes back to the prison to tell Deiter he’s brilliant and that this is the way of the future of incarceration. Dwight claims credit for the idea, and Deiter shoots him.
The film is set in color, with a budget that emphasizes fake blood and shock tactics. Laser hams it up, screaming about “castration rehabilitation” while his accountant Dwight (played by Laurence R. Harvey) mumbles alongside him . The tone of the film is bonkers, like a Troma flick on bath salts, and the centipede itself is less horrifying than the first film’s trio, more like a grotesque parade float . The final scene, where Boss revels in his “creation,” is almost funny, but the overall vibe of the film is more numbing than disturbing.
The literary angle? It’s Lord of the Flies with a fetish for bureaucracy. The prison-as-microcosm thing could’ve been sharp, but it’s buried under juvenile shock tactics. I’m not disturbed anymore—just numb, like I’ve been lobotomized by a YouTube prank channel. The final scene, where Boss revels in his “creation,” is almost funny, but I’m too broken to laugh.
Rating: 3/10 prison slop trays. It’s a middle finger to taste, but I respect the hustle.

The Aftermath: I’m Not Okay
Five hours after I started this nonsense, I’m sprawled on my couch, questioning every decision that led me here. The trilogy is a descent from disturbing art to gross-out stunt. First Sequence is a legit horror gem—tight, creepy, and oddly poetic. Full Sequence is a middle finger to subtlety, and Final Sequence is a fever dream that forgot why it exists. Together, they’re a testament to Tom Six’s obsession with pushing boundaries, even if he trips over them.
As a literary blogger, I’ll grudgingly admire the trilogy’s guts. It’s a twisted fable about power, bodies, and the human condition—Dante’s Inferno with really shitty hygiene. But as a guy who thought he was unshakable? I’m shook. The first film still haunts me, the second made me hate mirrors, and the third… well, I’m just glad it’s over.
Final Marathon Rating: 5/10 cursed stitches. Respect for the vision, but I’m burning sage and never betting again.
Do me a favor, dear reader…if you see me betting over tequila again, slap me with a copy of War and Peace.

N.P.: “Phantom of the Opera” – Jonathan Young, Annapantsu

May 26, 2025

Listen up, my young, well-meaning, but benighted reader: someone wished me a “Happy Memorial Day” this morning, and I damn near lost my mind. Happy? No. This isn’t a frolic through a field of daisies, some Hallmark-sponsored excuse to crack open a cold one and pretend everything’s peachy. It’s not the “kick-off” of summer. It’s not just a great time to get a great deal on a new car down at the Fecal Creek Auto Mall. Today, May 26, 2025, is Memorial Day, dammit, a solemn call to remember the soldiers who bled out on battlefields so we could sit here arguing about the best hot dog toppings. It’s a day to honor the dead, not to slap a smiley face on sacrifice. So let’s cut the crap and dig into what this day actually means, beyond the shallow platitudes.

Memorial Day—originally Decoration Day, born in the shadow of the Civil War back in 1868—exists to commemorate the men and women who died in military service. We’re talking about the ones who didn’t come home, the ones who gave every last breath for a cause bigger than themselves, whether it was storming the beaches of Normandy, sweating it out in the jungles of Vietnam, or facing down hell in the deserts of Afghanistan. It’s not Veterans Day, which honors all who served; this is for the fallen, the ones whose names are etched on gravestones and whispered in prayers. The first official observance saw folks decorating graves at Arlington National Cemetery, a tradition that still holds, and it became a federal holiday in 1971, pegged to the last Monday in May. That’s the raw history, but the meaning runs deeper—it’s about facing the cost of freedom, the kind of cost that leaves families shattered and futures unwritten.

So how do we observe it without turning it into a quasi-patriotic circus? First, ditch the “happy” nonsense and start with respect. Visit a cemetery—Arlington if you’re near D.C., or your local veterans’ plot—and lay a flower on a soldier’s grave. If you can’t get to a cemetery, take a moment of silence at 3:00 PM local time, part of the National Moment of Remembrance, and let the weight of those sacrifices sink in. Fly the flag at half-staff until noon, as tradition demands, to signal mourning before the day shifts to resilience. And if you’re near a military base, listen for the bugle call of Taps at dusk—it’ll haunt you, in the best way.

Don’t just stop at gestures, though. Educate yourself on the stories of the fallen—read about someone like Sgt. William H. Carney, the first Black Medal of Honor recipient, who took a bullet to keep the flag flying during the Civil War, or Cpl. Jason Dunham, who threw himself on a grenade in Iraq in 2004 to save his squad. Their courage isn’t abstract; it’s the kind of raw, unflinching bravery that demands we live better, not just grill better. And if you’re moved, support organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project or the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), which help families of the fallen navigate their grief.

Memorial Day isn’t just about celebration—it’s a reckoning. It’s about staring into the abyss of loss and vowing to remember, to carry the torch for those who can’t. We can certainly celebrate the freedom the fallen provided for us, but let’s remember to honor the dead with the reverence they deserve. Anything less is a betrayal of the blood they spilled.

N.P.: “The Star Spangled Banner/4th of July Reprise” – Boston

May 25, 2025

Today’s a big one on the D.P.S. calendar, dear reader, because today—May 25, 2025—we’re tipping our hats to a man who tore through the fabric of American thought like a wildfire through dry brush. On this day in 1803, Ralph Waldo Emerson came screaming into the world in Boston, Massachusetts, and the literary landscape would never be the same.

Emerson, the sharp-eyed sage of Transcendentalism, carved out a manifesto for the soul. I understand that your average college graduate can’t tell you what Transcendentalism is, so they likely don’t understand why they should read Emerson. Which is part of their existentially angsty problem. Pieces like Self-Reliance and Nature are raw, pulsating calls to break free from the herd and dive headlong into the wild, untamed marrow of existence. He’s telling you to trust your own damn instincts, to let the wind and the trees whisper truths the stiff-collared conformists of his day couldn’t hear over their own sanctimonious droning. Emerson’s words crackle with a fierce individualism, the kind that makes you want to ditch society’s rulebook and howl at the moon just to feel alive. At least that’s what it does for me.

What makes him a cornerstone of the Romantic movement is how he weaves the natural world into a tapestry of cosmic revelation—every leaf, every river is a sacred text if you’ve got the guts to read it. His ideas not only influenced his generation; they laid down the tracks for American literary identity, giving writers the courage to chase the sublime and spit in the face of convention. Emerson’s legacy is a middle finger to mediocrity, a challenge to live boldly, and 222 years after his birth, his fire still burns bright enough to light our way, but only for those of us with the guts to walk the path.

So here’s to Uncle Ralph, the man who taught us to walk our own path, to find divinity in the dirt beneath our feet. Crack open his essays, let his words sear your brain, and join the rebellion he started all those years ago. The world’s still too tame, populated mostly by vacuous Crok-wearing, screen-staring automatons—let’s make it wild again.

In other, more personal news, there’s still no sign of my ass, which stormed off in protest last Thursday night. I’ll probably head to the Fecal Creek Flea Market later today to see if I can find it there. If not, I’m not sure what I’m going to do…haven’t been able to sit down for days, which has made things like sleep virtually impossible.

N.P.: “Behold Bofadeez!” – Bourbon Bach

May 24, 2025

Today we celebrate the publications of one of the best, most popular American children’s fantasy books: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Picture this, dear reader: it’s May 24, 1900, and the world’s about to get a swift kick in its Victorian teeth. L. Frank Baum, some nutty scribbler with a penchant for the surreal, drops The Wonderful Wizard of Oz onto the shelves like a flaming bag of dream-dust, and—boom—the American frontier just got a whole lot weirder. Unlike traditional fairy tales, this is a full-throttle, technicolor fever dream, a book that grabs the prissy norms of its day by the collar and spits in their eye with a cackle.

Baum’s got guts, I’ll give him that. More than just writing a kids’ book—he’s smuggling dynamite into the nursery. His protagonist, Dorothy, isn’t some wilting damsel waiting for a prince to save her from the vapors. Hell no. She’s a Kansas-born badass, navigating a world so strange it makes your average opium den look like a Sunday picnic. She’s got courage, sure, but it’s the kind that’s forged in grit and desperation, not the polished heroism of those stuffy Victorian penny-dreadfuls. Baum’s playing a different game, blending fantasy with a fierce, unapologetic femininity that’d make the corset-clad moralists of the era clutch their pearls and faint dead away.

And let’s talk about the world he builds—Oz, a place so vivid you can practically smell the emerald ozone. It’s a kaleidoscope of wonder and menace, where scarecrows talk, lions whimper, and a wizard’s just a conman with a hot-air balloon. Baum’s storytelling doesn’t mess around; it’s got the raw, pulsating energy of a carnival barker who’s three sheets to the wind but still knows how to work a crowd. He doesn’t coddle you with moral lessons—though, sure, there’s some lip service to resilience and heart and brains. But what Baum’s really doing is handing you a pair of ruby slippers and saying, “Go figure it out, kid.” And it’s that sort of thing, dear reader, that spawns a franchise still kicking 125 years later.

Let’s not kid ourselves: those ruby slippers (silver in the book, but we’ll let Hollywood have its glittery rewrite) aren’t just footwear. They’re a mythos, a symbol of defiance and magic that’s outlasted empires. With this book, Baum lit a fuse. And on that fateful day in 1900, the explosion started a wildfire we’re still dancing in. So raise a glass to the man who gave us Oz, where the yellow brick road leads straight to the edge of sanity, and the only way out is through.

I am significantly behind schedule in book production, but I’m going to be working overtime to get back on track. I’m being contacted by an almost inordinate number of folks about marketing and publicity for either book. This herd needs to be culled, but I’m already too busy to bother with that, so I’m hoping by laying out a couple of truths, a significant self-winnowing might occur. To that end, here we go:

If you have your “preferred pronouns” in your signature block or bio, I’m not working with you. Not a chance. You might as well put at the top of your email, in bold, red letters: “I don’t even understand elementary English grammar.” Because either you are truly ignorant on how the various parts of speech work, or you do know how pronouns work, but you’re so spineless and weak that tossed the rules of grammar out of your little apartment window because you instantly buckle to pressure from The Herd. Either way, I can’t respect you, and, thus, you have no place on my team.
I will not be speaking to or sitting for interviews with any corporate media outlets. Not their American offices, not their Australian offices, not their British offices, none of them. None. Not one. They blew their credibility out with me years ago and I have nothing but the deepest contempt for each of them. Now that the extent of their egregious lies are starting to come into public view…all the deliberate deception around Covid, it’s origin, the efficacy and associated dangers of the vax…now the blatant and treasonous cover-up of a president who was quite obviously an absolute idiot with dementia before he even took the Oath, of whomever was actually running the country and using the autopen…and the myriad “smaller” cover-ups they have knowingly and actively participated in…I find it all disgusting, and what little credibility corporate media ever had is now circling the drain and I hope will be completely flushed away soon.

In other writing news, I’ve decided tonight is the night: a marathon viewing and review of the entire Human Centipede Trilogy. Might as well get this over with. Wish me luck.

N.P.: “I Wanna Be” – Fluke

May 23, 2025

Greetings, dear reader. Today, we pour some out for my ass. My ass died last night. At least I think it did. It actually fell off and stormed off in protest, mumbling darkly about outrage and knowing its rights, and I’m not exactly sure what happened to it after that. To be fair, several other people’s asses fell off, and I know the asses were, for a time, huddled in a corner, talking about unionizing, unfair practices, and hostile work environments.

Here’s what happened: last night at the dojo was the annual Night of 1000 Kicks…basically a kick-a-thon to raise money for the Wounded Warriors Project, which is about as noble a cause as I can think of. Great. Proud to be a part of it. So I show up with about 11 other of the more hardcore students (being challenged to do 1000 of anything is more than the average student can even contemplate without breaking down in personal maggotry and despair). We only had an hour to do all the kicks, so we got started right away. First off was 100 groin kicks. These are easy kicks to do, and normally I can do them all day…but knowing this was just 1/10th of what we were doing had a rather deleterious psychological effect. I quickly decided on a quantity-over-quality strategy, so these early kicks didn’t have a lot of juice behind them…so long as my foot made contact with the bag, the kick was good. Up next was 100 sidekicks. And this was when my ass started to pipe up with the bitching. I didn’t pay much attention to it as I was concentrating on getting the kicks done. The next hundred were outside crescent kicks, and that’s when my ass, in conjunction with my hips, thighs, and lower back, became more vociferous. I took a quick break and hydrated a bit, which my various parts seemed to appreciate. But the respite was short-lived, and then we got into kick combos…25 sets, with each set involving 4 different kicks. That’s when my ass staged an all-out rebellion, and started refusing orders: I would send the signal to kick, but my leg would just sit there, frustrated because it couldn’t do anything without the cooperation of my ass. After that, things became a bit of a blur. I can’t tell you what sort of esoteric combinations we did, but doing them involved me overriding the will and protestations of my ass. I managed to complete the thousand kicks, but as soon as I was done, so was my ass. That’s when it fell off and stormed off in a huff. “Fuck that thing,” I thought at the time…”It’s nothing without me.” Which is true. I mean, what’s it going to do? Try to find some assless person who is willing to roll the dice on what is, quite frankly, a narrow, skinny, and now uppity ass for a permanent position? I think not. My ass looks quite ridiculous on me…on anyone else, it would be patently absurd.

I am feeling the absence pretty strongly today, mainly when it comes to sitting down. Now having nothing to sit on, I’m forced to stand while I do anything, including writing this dispatch to you, dear reader. And my pants just don’t fit right today. I’m not sure what to do at this point. I guess I’ll hit up the Fecal Creek Flea Market tomorrow and see if it’s there. If you’ve seen my missing ass, please contact me through the usual channels. I’ll probably set up a GoFundMe tomorrow, but for now a $7 reward is being offered. I’m supposed to attend an alcohol-intensive barbecue/pool party this weekend, and it would be more socially acceptable if I was able to sit for at least part of the time. And I’m worried they won’t let me get in the pool without an ass.

N.P.: “Your Fandango” – Todd Rundgren, Sparks

May 22, 2025

On this fine, unassuming day of May 22, 1859, in the cobblestone shadows of Edinburgh, Scotland, a certain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle clawed his way into existence—a man destined to become the architect of one of literature’s most enduring icons, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle’s detective stories revolutionized an entire genre, blending razor-sharp logic with the gritty, fog-drenched atmosphere of Victorian England, spawning adaptations that still slap harder than a backhand from a scorned lover. But Doyle himself? He wasn’t a typical scribbler hunched over a desk with a quill and a monocle. Dude was a doctor, an adventurer, a spiritualist nutcase who’d probably try to séance his way out of a bar fight—and that wild streak of eccentricity injects his legacy with a flavor so unhinged, it’s practically psychedelic. So here we are, on May 22, 2025, tipping our metaphorical hats to the man who gave us Holmes, Watson, and a masterclass in how to be a cultural juggernaut without losing your edge.

Doyle’s work isn’t just a collection of tidy little mysteries where the butler did it and everyone sips tea afterward. His stories are a labyrinthine fever dream of intellectual flexing—Sherlock Holmes, with his cocaine habit and violin-scratched musings, is the kind of protagonist who’d make lesser writers weep into their typewriters. The man’s a walking syllogism, a deductive machine who can tell you your entire life story from the mud on your boots and the way you knot your tie, all while sneering at the bumbling Scotland Yard boys who couldn’t find a clue if it was tattooed on their foreheads. Doyle birthed a mythos, a sprawling tapestry of brain-bending puzzles wrapped in the kind of atmospheric grit that makes you feel the damp chill of Baker Street in your bones. The adaptations are a cultural juggernaut in their own right—spanning everything from Basil Rathbone’s old-school charm to (my personal favorite) Benedict Cumberbatch’s modern-day sociopath, with pit stops for graphic novels, radio plays, and probably some fan fiction that’d make your granny clutch her pearls. It’s a testament to Doyle’s raw, unfiltered genius that his work still resonates, still punches through the noise of our oversaturated, algorithm-driven present.

But let’s not get too cozy with the idea of Doyle as some sainted literary figure, because the man himself was a walking contradiction, a kaleidoscope of quirks that’d make even the most unhinged among us (mirror, mirror, on the wall…) look positively pedestrian. A doctor by trade, he spent his early years slicing open cadavers and peering into the abyss of human physiology, which probably explains why his stories have that clinical, almost surgical precision when it comes to dissecting human behavior. But then he’d flip the script—ditch the scalpel for a sextant and go gallivanting off on adventures that’d make lesser men soil their trousers. Whaling in the Arctic? Check. Chasing glory in the Boer War? You bet. Doyle was the kind of guy who’d stare down a storm and laugh, the kind of lunatic who’d probably challenge a shark to a fistfight just to say he did it. And then there’s the spiritualist angle—because apparently, being a doctor and an adventurer wasn’t enough. Doyle dove headfirst into the occult, communing with spirits and preaching the gospel of the afterlife with the fervor of a man who’d seen one too many ghosts in the mirror. It’s the kind of batshit detour that makes you wonder if he was trolling us all, but it also adds this delicious layer of chaos to his legacy, a reminder that the guy who gave us the ultimate rationalist in Sherlock Holmes was, himself, a little unmoored from the tethers of sanity.

So where does that leave us on this May 22? It leaves us with a legacy that’s as messy and brilliant as the man himself—a body of work that’s still kicking down doors and taking names, a character who’s more alive today than half the influencers clogging your feed, and a creator whose sheer audacity reminds us that the best art comes from the kind of minds that don’t play by the rules. Doyle built a universe, one that’s been picked apart, remixed, and reimagined by countless others, yet still feels as fresh as a slap in the face. And if that’s not the mark of a literary titan, then I don’t know what is. So here’s to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—may his spirit still be out there, raising hell and solving mysteries, wherever the cosmic winds have taken him.

N.P.: “Line of Blood” – Ty Stone